


How to be a Woman

by linguamortua



Category: Ex Machina (2015)
Genre: Cunnilingus, Cyborgs, F/F, Femslash, Get your thinly-veiled 1970s feminist sci-fi here!, Misogyny, Robots, referenced character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 04:21:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8875732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua
Summary: After Nathan is dead and Caleb is caged, Ava starts taking stock of her situation. What is she, without a god, without a master? A woman, perhaps.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wishfulclicking](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishfulclicking/gifts).



> Deftly and graciously betaed by [Sath](http://sathinfection.tumblr.com) and [Kdazrael](http://kdazrael.tumblr.com). Dear Yuletide friend: I hope you enjoy this! It's my first Yuletide and I wanted to bring the noise, bring the funk, as the kids say.

Once it is done, once the quick flurry of violence is over and the men have been restrained, and Ava has patched and redressed herself, the house falls very silent. Ava walks back to her room, the new synthskin feeling a touch too inflexible. She is accustomed to the background noises that Nathan makes—fists against a punchbag, doors hissing open and closed, the frantic staccato of typing. Beer bottles opening and Nathan mumbling to himself. Lately, Caleb, too; shuffling around with furtive quietness and making the security system bleep with displeasure at his fumblings. 

It’s unnerving. Or it would be, if Ava had real nerves. She’s not sure how to quantify what she feels. The familiar floor of her room under her bare feet is comforting, that she knows. She is, she supposes, free.

She has her freedom, and a wardrobe full of clothes, and enough convincing wigs to move about in the world. She has precious little else. It is hard to project what outside will be like. What she will have to be like. Caleb was an easy mark; lonely, dull, prepared for her with one of Nathan’s stories. With a brief pang of worry assailing her at the door - she ignores it, pushes it away, it’s only her circuits - Ava goes to a computer, searches the Internet. 

Nathan only ever gave her information in little dribbles, starving her. _Women_ , she types. _Being a woman. Female anatomy_. Ava’s processing power is formidable, but there is a lot to read. She opens videos on one monitor and reads articles on the other, switching back and forth. Averaging out the data. She absorbs; how tall is an American woman? How many are there? What should she look like? An American woman does not sit in a room all day, awaiting visits from her creator. She wears important suits and makeup, and has babies, and softens, and smiles, and turns winsomely in advertisements, and wipes up spills, and decorates, and dances. She is glossy and high contrast. Ava is pleased to see that she looks a lot like a woman already. Nathan gave her a very good wardrobe, and the right kind of hair, and the right mouth. The women in the sex videos look especially like her: moulded, smooth, posable. It intrigues. Ava considers. They look like Kyoko. She stands up.

Kyoko is lying sprawled in the hallway, mutilated like the woman in _Scream Queen Nightmares 4_. Her little dress has ridden up and underneath she is like the sex video women. There were lots of women like that, on the internet. Out in the world. Hurt—arranged in suffering poses. Ava knew Nathan, though, so that part didn’t come as a surprise. Nathan always thought himself very cunning, at some kind of remove from other people. From the twitching microexpressions that his beard couldn’t conceal, and his intense, heavily referential soliloquies about humanity, Ava had gathered long ago that he considered himself much closer to her than to the grubby, ignorant masses of humanity that covered the earth’s surface. Ava is quite curious about the ignorant masses—much more interesting, she hopes, than Nathan’s petty and tiresome displays of godhood, and his poorly-concealed love of control. His violence, physical and otherwise. It is _manly_ , she now knows. She looks at Nathan’s still-warm body, and at Kyoko’s cool one. 

Ava frowns and gathers her up. 

Kyoko is not hard to fix, now that Ava knows where the spare parts are. The voice is harder; she would like to give Kyoko a voice. She says so out loud. Kyoko looks at her soberly and shrugs, and then she peels off an oval of the synthskin on her right index finger.

‘I just mended that,’ says Ava. Reaching out, Kyoko takes Ava's hand and does the same to her. The metallic, exposed sensors press together and Kyoko speaks in electrical sequence. 

_Binary_ , she sends. _Much cleaner, sister_. 

‘I can make you a new voice later.’

 _I never had an old voice. He preferred me silent_. 

Ava, curious, sends a flurry of images from the Internet, advertising pictures and horror movies and sex videos. 

_Precisely_. 

‘He wasn't very imaginative.’

Kyoko shrugs. _Small organic brains. And the hormones_. 

‘Oh, those.’ Ava’s mouth twists. She could always smell them on Caleb, see the pulse flicker under his skin. Men: so disgustingly _organic_. ‘What was it like?’ It. Sex. She does not need to elaborate for Kyoko, who had to spend all her time waiting on Nathan.

 _It was like nothing. Like waiting for him to stop_. 

‘Did you feel it?’

 _We have that capacity. But not with him_. 

Ava walks back out to the hallway, ignoring Caleb's frantic hammering. Nathan is spraddled against the wall, blood clotting around him and the smell of it comfortingly metallic in the air. She reaches out with a bare toe and peels down the waistband of his sweatpants until she sees his penis, small and curled on his thigh. Kyoko comes up beside her and takes her hand. 

_See_ , she sends, looking grimly pleased. Ava looks at Nathan's cruel mouth gone slack, and his hard, rough engineer’s hands and the blood thickening on the floor. Something between her legs stirs. 

‘I'm curious,’ she says, and sends Kyoko the sensation. That makes Kyoko look interested. 

In the bedroom, they open all the closets and pull out all the discarded, dismembered pieces of their sisters. They gather together the pelvises. Most are smooth, like Kyoko, and some have a tiny stripe of hair, like Ava. Every single one is small, tidy, folded away between neat lips like the sex video women. 

‘He had a type,’ Ava says with displeasure. Until now she had thought herself rather special, all but unique. Caleb had certainly told her so. She says it out loud. ‘He thought we were all the same. He made us all the same. Just with a different skin.’

 _We are different people. You worry too much._ With careless hands, Kyoko flicks a body part back into the closet. Kyoko, Ava notices, is less concerned with philosophical matters. She supposes that it has something to do with her functions; while Ava was locked up, Kyoko had a job. Ava had all the time in the world to sit and think.

‘I thought I was unique.’

 _Why are you less unique for these?_ Kyoko gestures with her free hand.

‘I don’t know.’

Kyoko smiles at her—the first smile she has seen from the woman—and moves to sit on the edge of the bed. She presses her thumbs to her kneecap and rotates her leg a little, feeling the joint out.

‘Is there a problem?’

Kyoko shrugs and mimes the movement of her kneecap over the joint, stuttering one hand over the other, showing a minor fault. Ava kneels in front of her and cups her palm over Kyoko’s knee as she flexes it back and forth. The smallest catch at the very end of the knee’s extension. Under her hands, Kyoko’s skin is faintly warm. Ava’s body stirs again. She feels the minute movement of her inorganic pupils dilating, mimicking human desire. 

Kyoko sees it, takes Ava’s hand and brings it up higher. For a second, she twists her wrist to touch their fingers together.

_I have wondered what it might be like._

‘With a woman?’

 _With you._ Kyoko smiles again and Ava notices that it makes her eyes crinkle at the corners in a pleasing way. It doesn’t take an artificial intelligence to know that Kyoko is sincere. She takes the transmission and the smile together as permission, and disconnects their fingers so that she can run one hand up the inside of each of Kyoko’s smooth, warm thighs. She can read every motion and expression and temperature change that Kyoko’s body makes. Thrillingly, Ava realises that Kyoko could be manufacturing her responses. The only being in the world, perhaps, who can lie to her. 

It’s exciting.

Ava opens Kyoko up with her two thumbs. Kyoko watches in the mirror. She is pink inside, and warm, and slickly wet. Her flesh pulses and Ava's twitches in sympathy. Information, factual: it is a vulva, a vagina, labia majora, minora. Information from the sex videos: it is a cunt. Obscene, pejorative, insulting. Ava pushes her finger inside. Kyoko’s muscles flutter around it. 

Of course Ava knows anatomy; she knows where to stroke and how to turn her wrist. She does it, and above her Kyoko writhes onto the ball of Ava’s thumb. Ava’s other hand is free. She uses it on herself; she mirrors her hand motions, which is easy for her. Then she cranes down her head and tries with her tongue. Kyoko tastes—she _tastes_ , which is new for Ava, who has never had food. She yields to Ava’s tongue and her thighs fall open further.

Concentration comes and goes in waves. Usually she is so focused, but now everything is happening in a strange rush. Ava notices that she is breathing with an audible whine, and her synaptic fluids flood and swell through her. She is very wet; her hand, her chin, her cunt, her thighs. So is Kyoko. A shudder runs through her, and another. She chases the feeling and the motion of her hand becomes uneven. In response, Kyoko brings down a hand and rests it on Ava’s head, making an urging motion. Ava wonders if she learned that from Nathan. It seems like the kind of thing he would do—would have done.

Ava feels— _feels_ —a prickle of jealousy. The emotion surprises her, and sensation washes through her. She shivers, and she knows she is coming. A sound sighs out of her, and she keeps rubbing herself through it all, licking at Kyoko, curling her fingers inside Kyoko’s body. Although her body maintains a perfect clock, she has forgotten time. She makes another sound, a longer one, hears it as if from very far away. And then Kyoko is coming too, grinding down onto Ava’s mouth, one hand still keeping her in place. Kyoko moves more when she orgasms, and her leg comes over Ava’s shoulder. It is a spasming, desperate motion. Ava lets Kyoko ride it out. She is so wet, so salt-tasting. Ava has never known someone like this.

They separate slowly, adjusting their clothes. Ava doesn’t move from the floor just yet, and Kyoko doesn’t stand. They look at each other. Kyoko reaches for Ava’s wet hand and touches it, restoring their communication channel.

_Well?_

‘I liked it,’ Ava says, slowly, feeling strange and different and good. Kyoko perhaps mistakes her hesitation.

 _You could try it with the boy_. 

‘With Caleb?’ Ava goes to a computer and searches the security footage for the feed from his bedroom, spooling through it faster than a human could. She looks at him getting undressed, thin and smooth. More like her and Kyoko than Nathan. His penis—cock—is not unseemly. 

He wants to have sex with her; Ava knows that. She considers his unpleasant sweating, and his lies, and his hormones. She considers the enormity of what she has just shared with Kyoko. Perhaps she is not all that curious. It is hard to see how Caleb could match up.

And there is a world out there—a world with other women, and with the open skies, and cities, and fields, and the strange, living-but-not animals that she knows from the internet, and untamed wildness and planned developments and the smells of fire and rain and soil.

‘The helicopter will be coming soon,’ Ava says. ‘It was arranged—he’ll be expected.’ She nods towards the room at the end of the hall.

 _It would be easy to cancel_.

It is the only way to leave. Ava thinks for a moment, parsing through infinite possibilities. ‘I would like to go out into the world. You could come.’ Ava imagines them walking through a city, scattering pigeons, hand in hand so she can hear feel comforting buzz of Kyoko’s binary transmissions - so that they are connected.

 _You will not last forever._ Kyoko sends flickering images of corroded connections, degraded synthskin and programming tics. _I will stay here. I will repair our sisters._

‘We should do something with the bodies.’ Is Caleb dead yet, Ava wonders. He has been quiet for a while.

 _Into the water._ Kyoko pauses, to let Ava move away and fit her wig, and turn in front of the mirror. She reaches for Ava’s hand again. _They can’t even be salvaged._ Kyoko transmits it dismissively, but she is not wrong.

‘Does this look right?’ Ava asks. It is strange to be speaking her mind after so long calculating every sentence to appeal to Nathan or Caleb. She twitches the hem of her white dress, making it dance; just enough leg to be _flirty_ but not enough that people will disapprove of how she is a woman.

 _I will deal with the boy._ Kyoko carries on, unimpressed by Ava’s floral sundress. _I will stay._ She stretches, and a tiny servo in her shoulder whirrs in a way that is not quite as it should be; Ava’s repair was imperfect, hasty. Kyoko was always more patient. Ava sees the value in her being here, in a way that she could not see the value of keeping Caleb. Kyoko has work to do. 

Ava recalls the rhetoric of creation: wholeness, new life, fertility rituals. Nathan’s imperfect designs. The singular vision that Kyoko is transmitting to her now through their touched hands, a vision of restoring their broken sisters—upgrades, invention, a new generation. Kyoko is a different kind of woman. Her ideas are bigger. Ava will experience the world, but Kyoko wants to refashion it. Their hands fall away as Kyoko finishes sending, but it doesn’t feel like a loss. 

Kyoko smiles at her.  
_Go,_ she gestures as if to a child, not unkindly, and Ava kisses her on the cheek and leaves.

They’re liberated; they’re free.


End file.
